The municipal government of Nanjing, capital of east China's Jiangsu Province, issued a controversial regulation on April 22 requiring officials to report extramarital affairs, believing it would curb corruption.

Zhuo Zeyuan, a professor at the Politics and Law Department of the Party School of the Communist Party of China (CPC), said the system would help put officials under public supervision, but that reporting should not infringe on the rights of officials' spouses.

According to the Marriage Law revision expert panel, 95 percent of convicted corrupt officials had extramarital lovers; in the southern cities of Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Zhuhai, this included all the officials involved in the 102 corruption cases investigated in 1999.

The regulation also gives the government permission to intervene in the relationship if the official's family stability is thought to have been affected, though the precise criteria for deciding when this had happened were not reported.

Mo Jihong, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Institute of Law Science, said the rule violates privacy and Marriage Law, which states that citizens should enjoy freedom of marriage and divorce.

Mo said it is also unrealistic, since no one would voluntarily speak out about their extramarital affairs.

Wang Lei, associate professor at Peking University's Law School, argued that civil servants, especially senior ones, could not enjoy full privacy because their posts bring them too much power. If they failed to disclose enough personal information, the public would fear that they were not being supervised.

Last year, a national anti-corruption research group suggested central government establish a public account for officials to return bribes, after five-year-long research on a corruption prevention and control strategy.

In 2003 and 2004, 13 and 16 ministerial-level officials respectively were imprisoned for taking bribes.

The CPC in 2004 published its first internal supervision regulations since 1949 to intensify the country's anti-graft campaign.

The 47-article Regulations of Internal Supervision of the Communist Party of China put all 68 million Party members under rigid public supervision.

(Xinhua News Agency April 20, 2005)